Book Review

Three years ago I received the first novel by David Athey, Danny Gospel a novel I thoroughly enjoyed.  His new novel Christopher
explores some similar themes, but not a repeat in any way.

The story follows Christopher starting at the age of eleven.  Christopher is a lover of nature and does more than to stop to smell the roses, but to really look at a rose.  His parents are a sort of hold out from the sixties with his mother being into alternative therapies and vegetarianism.  Christopher comes to meet a young girl from a Catholic family whose Catholicism is quite fervent.

This basic plot sounds like  a setup of sort with a critique of the sixties and what will obviously happen with Christopher contact with this Catholic family.  Though this is not how this story really plays out at all and transcends a setup plot to be something much more fulfilling.  The story really kept me guessing and invested into it. Christopher is sort of haunted by contact with a series of Catholic girls in his young adult life and struggles between seeing the theological reality of something and seeing himself in that theological reality himself.  His introduction to stories on Grail Knights spark his imagination, and while the novel refers to him as a young knight, he is not a young knight without struggles or temptations.  The novel is very frank about these struggles which go beyond silly teenage angst but speak more of the human condition and specifically the struggle towards manhood.

I enjoyed the characters throughout the novel and Christopher’s parents are not simple stereotypes, but fully fleshed characters that contribute to the story.  A well told novel that while having a good amount of Catholic red meat in it is enjoyable on several levels.

Last year I read Fr. Jordan Aumann’s theology which I absolutely loved.  I recently finished another book he wrote Christian Spirituality in the Catholic Tradition which is sort of a companion book to Spiritual Theology.  While Spiritual Theology provided an excellent guide to the Church’s ascetical and mystical teaching on prayer this book looks at the history of Christian spirituality from the start of the Church to more modern times.

A quite fascinating and detailed book as it looks at the various movements of Catholic spirituality and how they developed and led to other movements.  I was aware of bits and pieces and various sections of this spiritual history, but Fr. Aumann really puts them all in contexts and pins down the developments.  The book also introduced me to many saints and others I was hardly aware of.  It is also quite interesting in how this history of spirituality shows that the more things change that they remain the same.  This history shows all the ebb and flow of Christianity and how each age much repent and reform.  While they have and will continue to be movements of reform, there are also many false starts and dead ends into false spiritualities.  Fr Aumann as a theologian and capable historian of the spiritual life puts it all together into a book well worth reading.

This book is available online at DomCentral.org or retailers such as Amazon.

I don’t normally do SF book reviews on this blog, but I will make an exception here for John C. Wright’s new book Count to a Trillion.  I have a special fondness for Mr. Wright being that he is also a former atheist now Catholic, but my fondness extends way beyond Catholic tribalism as I immensely enjoy both his books and his blog.

Anybody who as read his books from the Golden Age trilogy to Null-A-Contiuum knows he is a writer of big ideas and this book is an embarrassment of riches.  So many great ideas are contained within that they could have been parsed out a basis for a dozen of other SF books.  This book follows the rich tradition of the Space Opera where it’s not over until the “voluptuous green-skinned spacewomen in silvery space-bikinis” sing.

The specific story follows young Menelaus Illation Montrose from his childhood on.  The Western world is in collapse and the world is divided up into various spheres of influence such as the Indosphere and the Hispanosphere.  Menelaus is a brilliant polymath who dreams of “shining tomorrows” and the disappointments of actual life and not flying cars and other gee wiz technological developments.  His dreams are partially shaped by a comic book series named Asymptote that has many shadows of Star Trek and it’s view of the future of man along with the cornier aspects related to Captain Kirk.  As someone whose childhood included the start of the Star Trek series and the race to the moon this young character had many elements I could relate to.  His mother though has other plans for him that don’t include such starry-eyed dreaming and seemingly escapist literature.

His path to adulthood leads through various phases of apprenticeship with nothing fully using his talents.  He becomes a dueling-lawyer, that is a lawyer that handles things outside of court hi-tech dueling pistols.  The description of one of the duels is one of the great ideas the story is so peppered with.  These special guns with defenses reminds me of aviation warfare with electronic countermeasures, chaff, and other deceptive techniques along with special missiles.  Having worked in this area in my Navy career this brining it down to the dueling level was especially pleasing. But this is only a small part of the plot of the book.

The main thrust of the book deals broadly with space flight, harvesting of a star, and the results of abundant cheap energy on the world as it is politically controlled.  Menelaus steps into this future and into a subsequent future a century or so hence is filled with missteps that  initially take him out of the action for part of the time.  When he becomes able to participate he finds himself in a future where there is no war, but with a very cold war atmosphere where a group of spaceman-scientists have blackmailed the world both with cheap energy and the threat of destruction that can’t be countered.  Instead of Mutual Assured Destruction, there is just destruction for those who oppose this rule.  This is a more dystopian than utopian future as the lack of wars does not denote actual peace and while technological developments have changed many things for the better, the tensions involving the source of energy are causing other pressures leading to conflict.

Being that John C. Wright has written about the “New Space Princess Movement” and our need for it, it is not surprising that the book indeed includes a beautiful and super intelligent Space Princess.  A very enjoyable character who to me has shadows of the thankfulness of G.K. Chesterton.  Maybe I am reading this into the story, but there seemed to be a light shadow of Chesterton in it.  Of course any story with a Space Princess will set up a love triangle and in this case it is between Menelaus and his best friend and now dangerous foe Del Azarchel and Princess Rania. This of course creates most of the tensions in the latter half of the book leading to a showdown between the two.

But with there’s more.  The book also deals with post humanism and contact with an alien civilization which has left an artifact so dense with information that ultimately it can only be read by someone with post human intelligence.  The big ideas surrounding this aspect are also very interesting and the consequences of this and possible contact with the aliens that left this drives the plot in multiple ways that are surely to develop since this is first book of the trilogy.

John C. Wright slings a lot of scientific BS in this novel, but it is slung well and is a higher order of scientific BS than of the Star Trek variety.  So there is a bit of technobabble, but you also get the feeling it more science-based than just space opera plot filler. The philosophical discussions between the main characters is also interesting and makes the types of distinctions I like to see.  Really the dialogue is quite enjoyable and often very funny at times.  One description involving hackers and Moby Dick is one of the funniest things I have ever read and his pun on the spanish pronunciation of Jesus is one that will never let me hear the Spanish pronunciation of the name the same again.

One reviewer takes to task how the  super-intelling post human version of Menelaus in that he “talks like a caricature of John Wayne in a low-budget Western.”  I can understand this criticism, but it seems to me also a bit of a bias as I can think of at least one Texan who I would consider very intelligent and extremely well read and who talks in a folksy Texan style.

The ending of this book though is more in the fashion of a cliffhanger from an old serial than is usual in space opera.  Many things are left hanging and since I enjoyed the book so much my patience of waiting for the rest of the trilogy will be quite taxing. The book might not be for everybody, but it was certainly for me who loves both space opera and the old movie serials.

I recently read Fire of Love: A Historical Novel about St. John of the Cross and of course today being St. John of the Cross’ feast day it is perfect to provide a review.

This is not a historical novel along the lines of  for example something from Louis De Wohl.  For the most part fictional dialog is kept to a minimum and it seems apparent to me that much information was culled from the source documents of interviews conducted for St. John of the Cross’ cause.  So what you end up with is a very good biography that reads like a novel.

I thought I knew a good deal about this great saint and Doctor of the Church, but I learned a great deal I did not know about his background and family.  One aspect I really liked is that the book starts with the courtship of Juan de Yepes Álvarez parents. You rarely see this in biographies of the saints, except perhaps in the case of St. Therese.  Like St. Therese Juan’s parents followed the path of holiness and the story of how they got together is quite endearing and seems more like a plot of a romantic novel.  The story of a man from a well-to-do family who falls in love with a peasant women and marries her despite being cast off from the family is the stuff of legends and in this case the stuff of reality.  The tragedy of his father dying fairly young introduces the other people in his life that had an effect on him.  There is a lot of background information on his youth.

I also really enjoyed the information regarding his brothers who were also positive examples of the Catholic life fully lived. The aspects of the story involving St. Teresa of Avila and his later imprisonment and subsequent life I already well knew.  This book though put this all into a context that made that information much richer and more alive.  I thoroughly enjoyed the telling of the story as done by Jose Luis Olaizola.

I listened to the audiobook version which once again was done by the talented Kevin O’Brien. Though this is a more straight ahead performance of his narrative skills being that there was limited opportunity for character voices.

Fire of Love  – Electronic Book Download

Fire of Love  – Paperback

* The audiobook version is not yet up at Ignatius Press.

From time to time on Patrick Madrid’s Open Line show on EWTN or as part of Catholic Answers I have heard him refer callers to a book named Spiritual Theology (Stagbooks) by Father Jordan Aumann, O.P.  So I started to look around for it.  This book being published in 1980 is not readily available and so is rather pricey in either new or in used condition.  I happened to come across that they have this book available online at DomCentral.org and so I downloaded each chapter and created an ebook of it to read.

First off my impression of the book is simply wow!  I have been using it for spiritual reading over the last month and I was just totally impressed by it.  The late Fr. Aumann takes the categories of Ascetical  and Mystical theology and treats it under the category of spiritual theology.  This is like a catechism of spiritual theology and provides an in-depth coverage of the subject.  Since it was written by an Dominican of course you can expect lots of distinctions, something I really like.  The best thing is just how accessible it is considering this is such a complex subject.  He refrains from using philosophical technical terms when not required and fully explains them when he does use them.  This is a book I think would be beneficial for all and one that can be also used as a reference considering its broad range.

As an interested layman and very amateur theologian I was also very happy to find beyond the accessibility of the book that there was nothing I could consider dubious that would set off my theological spider senses.  When a theological proposition is uncertain he says so frankly and so you always know what is Church teaching and what is theological speculation. The book is filled with the wisdom of the Doctors of the Church and you find referenced particularly St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, the Carmelite Doctors, St. Ignatius of Loloya, and St. France de Sales.  As such he provides an amazing synthesis of the teachings of these Doctors as it applies to spiritual theology.  At 448 pages this is not a quick read, but one totally worthy of study and as a reference to come back to.

Considering that is book is available online and also as a zip file here I don’t think there are any problems with me providing an ebook edition of it.  The online edition contains some formatting errors as it was probably scanned in using OCR. Regardless these formatting errors are very minor and infrequent and do not distract from a reading of the text.

Spiritual Theology – ePub version

Spiritual Theology – Kindle version

With author Michael O’Brien there are certain things you come to expect in his novels. Deep character sketches so well-crafted that the words almost demand that the person depicted be more than just fictional. Characters who are emotionally wounded, physically wounded, or a combination of this. A spiritual dimension that is just not a polish to the story, but an integral part of it. Cultural commentary and even art criticism are also components.

In his new novel “The Father’s Tale” the story is told of Alex Graham a bookseller and widower who has withdrawn from life and into his books. A basically good and pious man who after his wife’s death has kept to himself avoiding any societal entanglements. His staid life is fractured when his college-age son disappears.

Michael O’Brien calls this novel “A modern retelling of the parables The Good Shepherd and The Prodigal Son.” which is a very apt description. In this regards it reminds me favorably of Ron Hansen’s “Atticus” another book I loved. The Prodigal Son theme is at several levels. Alex Graham while looking for his prodigal son is himself a prodigal son in relationship to God the Father. Other characters fall into this theme also. Alex Graham embarks on a world-wide chase after his son in a nightmare journey that is also a dark night of the soul. The feeling of the loss of God combines with alienation from the world around him as he comes to seemingly lose all support. His journey is a purgative road where he meets many people along the way in the search for his son.
At over a 1000 pages this is not a simple adventure story and a rescuing of a son, but something deeper and richer. Again you can see aspects of Michael O’Brien the iconographer in his writing along with the theological emphasis of the Eastern Catholic and Orthodox Churches. This aspect especially shines through here. O’Brien certainly has a tendency to monologue via his characters at times, but I forgive him this because he has something to say that is worth hearing. You might think there should have been plenty of room for an editor to scale back the size of the book, but there is not a section I would have wanted cut. The novel left me both entertained and thoughtful afterwards. The plot itself took so many twists and turns that I came to not be able to anticipate what was going to happen next other than the general flow of the theme. It is always hard to evaluate a novel fresh after reading it in comparison to the author’s other novels. Regardless, I feel this is his finest novel to date.

The Ignatius Press audiobook version is again done by Kevin O’Brien. I listen to a fair amount of professionally done audiobooks and i would place Kevin O’Brien skills in the upper tier. His ensemble of voices and performance brings something extra to an already good story.

Being an accidental book reviewer I am pleased by my latest milestone. I was requested to review the latest book in the Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson “The Alloy of Law” for SFFAudio.

Review @ SFFAudio.com

SFFAudio as you would suspect reviews audio content in the Science Fiction and Fantasy genres and also provides their own audio content via their podcast. The interesting tie-in is that one of the founders of the site Scott Danielson is an ex-atheist now Catholic. Julie Davis of Happy Catholic also contributes to SFF Audio. So now with me also doing occasional reviews there are three former atheists and now Catholics contributing along with a range of other people.

This is also an opportune time to re-plug one of my favorite podcasts “A Good Story is Hard to Find.” I so enjoy Scott D. and Julie D.’s look at film and books from a Catholic point of view. There insights and recommendations either help me enjoy more something I was already familiar with or direct me to something I should become familiar with.

Being that I am somewhat immobilized with a muscle tear it at least has given me a chance for even more reading. So I started reading the letters of St. John of Avila. Due to the recent announcement that he will be made a Doctor of the Church I figured it would be a good idea to acquaint myself with a saint who preached to saints and whose preaching led to conversions of saints.

So far his letters have been just what I needed to read as they are so punctuated with the Gospel and his solid spiritual advice. It is hard to whine about my relatively minor pains reading his advice on suffering to those really suffering. There is just so much good stuff in his letters and yes I use stuff in the theologically technical sense. When his contemporary St. Teresa of Avila was being questioned about her teaching she was told to write it down and submit it to John of Avila and that they would go by what he had to say. In response St. John of Avila writes a great letter thanking her for what she has to say on prayer for his own soul while also making some suggestions for improving the clarity of her book to avoid confusion.

His letters are quite warm while showing great concern for a persons spiritual life and the dangers contained. One passage left me laughing in an example he gave.

While pondering over this truth, a holy hermit saw a woman of the world pass by, magnificently dressed and bejewelled. He burst into tears, exclaiming: “I beseech Thee to pardon me, O Lord, for this woman in one day takes more trouble to please men, than I have done in many years to please Thee!”

Now that is some holy humor! A footnote on this passage revealed.

The monk was St. Nonnus, Bishop of Heliopolis, and the woman St. Pelagia, an actress at Antioch, of bad repute, who had formerly been a catechumen. A few days after the incident recorded, she heard St. Nonnus preach a sermon on the Last Judgment, which so touched her heart, that she went to him and with many tears, begged him to baptise her. He did so, and, giving all her riches to the poor, she went to the Holy Land, where, under the name of Pelagius, she spent many years in penance, shut up in a narrow cell with only a small aperture for a window. She acquired the reputation of a Saint, and at her death, the people were surprised to discover that she was not a man: the virgins of the neighbourhood bore her body to their church as a rich treasure.

In another letter written to a Jesuit near death he playfully congratulates him on his upcoming promotion.

However, I am sending you my congratulations on your promotion to be prebendary 1 in the heavenly Jerusalem, where God is praised to all eternity and seen face to face.

Another footnote explains that a prebendary is he:

who resides within the precincts of a Cathedral and constantly attends its services, to that of the Saints who “stand before the throne” of God and “rest not day nor night, saying ‘Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty,” and whose company the dying Jesuit hoped soon to join.

I just absolutely love this idea of death as a promotion for the faithful. Though prudentially I doubt if Hallmark will come up with “Congratulations on your upcoming promotion” cards for those who are dying. I do hope to be promoted one day and to avoid demotion.

You can get the letters in various ebook formats here. The formatting is not the best and there are obvious OCR translation errors. Though they are minor enough.

Between Heaven and Mirth: Why Joy, Humor, and Laughter Are at the Heart of the Spiritual Life is the new book by Fr. James Martin S.J. Being that this is a subject close to my own heart I snapped at the offer to receive a review copy.  I had previously read Fr. Martin’s “My Life with the Saints” a book I really enjoyed with some minor caveats.  He is certainly a talented writer who uses much humor in his writing and some of the stories he wrote in his first book have stayed with me.

His new book looks at the use of humor in the spiritual life and how laughter and joy are components of it.  He specifically did not set out to write the book totally from a theological point of view, but it is not without some theological points.  Instead he has focused on several areas and questions involving these subjects.  While humor and laugher can have expressions in joy, joy is something much deeper than simple mirth and a resulting happiness.  I really like that he included St. Thomas Aquinas definition of joy as “happiness in God”.  This is an important distinction to make in a book of this type.

Throughout the book he tells many humorous stories and many religious jokes.  As you would expect when it comes to humor in the saints you see the roll call you would expect such as the famous lines of St. Lawrence and St. Teresa of Avila along with some funny quips of modern popes.  I especially liked the quote about humor and mirth he provided from one of Pope Benedict’s books*.  St. Thomas More was a man who could be quite funny on the way to getting his head chopped off. The quote in the book is “I pray you, I pray you, Mr Lieutenant, see me safe up and for my coming down, I can shift for myself” Though my favorite of his is since his beard was grown during his imprisonment that said it was completely innocent of any crime, and did not deserve the axe.  Most of the examples his gives are certainly ones I would have chosen for inclusion in a book of this type.  Though I am surprised he didn’t reference Blessed Miguel Pro a fellow Jesuit who was not only a practical joker, but quite a funny guy who was also fearless in death.

Another subject he addresses early on is humor in regards to Jesus.  We have “Jesus wept”, but not “Jesus laughed.”  I know that Jesus does have a great sense of humor, after all he made me Catholic.  His discussion on this subject is mostly worthwhile and makes many points I would make myself.  Mostly we don’t see Jesus’ sense of humor in that we can easily forget how what he said would have affected those he preached to.  Absurdity and hyperbole is a playful use of language these were certainly tools that Jesus used in his preaching.  The absurdity of giving a snake instead of a fish to your son is striking and also playful.  The same goes for the calling of St. Bartholomew with “Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no guile” which plays on the story of Jacob/Israel and I also think the mysterious reference to calling him when he was under a fig tree had some humor involved lost to us.  This whole section was quite good except for a caveat I will get to later.

I would also share with Fr. Martin a critique of so much Catholic art that seems to be missing the joy of the saints.  He mentions the quote attributed to but not confirmed to have come from  St. Teresa of Avila  “From silly devotions and from sour-faced saints, good Lord, deliver us.”   Unfortunately not much has changed on this front.  One of my favorite parts of The Passion of the Christ was the scene with Jesus and Mary and their back and forth playfulness.  This seemed to ring so true to me.  Catholic statues of Mary seem to focus on her suffering and none of her joy. There is certainly a place for the fact of Mary’s sorrows for the sword that pierces her heart, but I would like to see more joyful ones with her holding the infant Jesus.  Though attempts such as the infamous “Jesus laughing” poster show possibly a misstep in the right direction.

This is a book that provides a good look at this subject and provides much humor along the way.  He is adept at telling humorous stories of his own life along with collection humorous quotes of others.  This book also does not confine itself only to Catholics as he quotes from a wide range of people in other faiths as it touches on the subject.  His writing style allows him to poke fun at himself while opening up a subject to a wider audience.

Now on to my caveats.  While I pretty much liked both of Fr Martin’s books that I have read they also tingle my Spidey theological senses at times.  For example in the chapter on humor in Jesus he references one person in regards to why there is no specific humor from Jesus in the Gospel. The theory was it was possibly redacted and that we just can’t know for sure if it was or wasn’t.  He passes on this with no comment.  This is pretty much Jesus Seminar territory or where some groups go in saying the early Church redacted what they didn’t agree with.  This idea has so many problems that I was quite annoyed that it was mentioned without any comment. Another thing that annoyed me was the reference to the Virgin Mary and a common question in regard to Mary’s “How can this be” and Zachariah’s doubt and subsequent muteness until the birth of John the Baptist.  He first contrasts the seeming reaction and then in the footnote gives a humorous explanation.  If he was just setting up a joke fine, but there is no actual comparison since a doubt is totally different than a question asked with faith.  You can totally believe something is going to occur and still wonder about the mechanism of how it was going to happen without doubting.  I also could have done without the numerous quotes from Fr. Anthony de Mello, S.J. While the quotes themselves were not problematic, other readers might want to read more from this author  and not know parts of his  works were in part deemed ‘incompatible with the Catholic faith’ by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.  Okay maybe my Spidey theological senses are tweaked a bit high for a book of this type, but what is annoying for me might be annoying for others.

My complaints are fairly minor and overall there was much to like about this book both in the writing and the content.  I can easily recommend this as a good book on the subject and this is an area that receives very little attention. It reminds me of the tagline of Creative Minority Report “We laugh because we believe”.

*”I believe [God ] has a great sense of humor. Sometimes he gives you something like a nudge and says “Don’t take yourself so seriously!”  Humor is in fact an essential element in the mirth of creation.  We can see how, in many matters in our lives, God wants to prod us into taking things a bit more lightly; to see the funny side of it; to get down off our pedestal and not to forget our sense of fun.” Pope Benedict XVI “God and the World”

Brandon Vogt’s review

Recently I was given the opportunity to read the new book by Gerard D. Webster for the Catholic Writers Guild. This is a good opportunity since I was remiss in not reviewing his first book.

The author happens to live in Jacksonville, Fl where I live and much of the story in his first two novels take place there. As someone who gets offers to review books from Catholic writers this can be both the same blessing and a curse that anybody who receives books for review has. An author is nice enough to send his book to you and the trepidation is usually what if it is really bad? Plus you have to watch out for your own biases. Though sometimes this watchfulness can be a bias in itself. I think that is the case when I read his first book In-Sight. I quite enjoyed the story and its Catholic emphasis, but I know I am not a very good judge of writing quality. I found though that even after reading the book almost two years ago – it stayed with me and I could recall pretty much all the details of the story. Something that is not usually the case with me.

In-sight was a story of a young liberal columnist and his world view and the clash between his Catholic parents. When at home with them while he loved them their Catholicism left him uncomfortable especially with his diametrically opposed views. His newspaper column is giving him rising popularity such that he is able to hob not in political circles. This leads to him seeing something he should not have seen and a circumstance that leaves him in a hospital badly hurt.

One of the main plots points is what if somebody received one of the charism of a saint such as the charism St. Padre Pio and St. John Vianney had in reading souls? Similar to the Portrait of Dorian Gray, but where you can see the state of the soul of others along with your own soul. An interesting premise and one that sets the journalist on a road of conversion and increased conflict as what he discovered skyrockets. His growing renewed relationship with his parents takes an interesting turn when his father reveals something to him along with the relationship he has with a local anchorwoman. A suspense thriller as the people behind what he discovers escalates their response.

In the second book The Soul Reader it picks up again with the now ex-columnist Ward McNulty as he begins an investigation with his ex-girlfriend into the conspiracy they had discovered to further uncover the primary people involved. The suspense again rises as a contract is put on their lives. Many interesting plot points involving assassins, a living saint, and other elements make it a good followup novel. The Catholic elements add to what would have been a good suspense novel regardless.